Cancerous Consumption

An interesting thing has happened at Pop!Tech today. While the theme was meant to have been "America: Reimagined," there has been an irresistible momentum across a huge number of presenters towards imagining America as a metaphor for humanity's insatiable consumption and the way that it has fundamentally imperiled our earth.

Photographer Chris Jordan has dedicated his life to documenting consumption, and making the invisible byproducts of our convenience visible. Today, for the first time in public, he shared an immensely disturbing slideshow of photographs taken on Midway Island, a small Island in the middle of the Pacific more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continental coast.

Chris had heard rumors that there, in that most remote of wildernesses, there were baby albatross dead with plastic sticking out of their carcasses. Having to see for himself, he went in September 2009. What he found was even worse than he had imagined.

Jordan compared the trip to getting a diagnosis of lymphatic cancer from a doctor. If this cancer is there, on Midway, as far removed from normal human activity as can be, then it's everywhere. Jordan concluded by saying that while he didn't have much more to say, it was something it seemed we all should be talking about.

It's getting harder and harder to avoid the implication that our system of existence has set the clock ticking on our future. That's a bleak, bleak place to be for people like me who are of a generation just coming into the adult world.

Yet necessity is the mother of invention. Young people today are the most educated, networked generation in history. As it becomes increasingly clear that we have no choice but to tackle this issue, some of our greatest minds are on the case. I can't help but think it will take all of them though.